Social Media as a marketing aspect has opened up new avenues for small business that ceased to exist before. Social Media, through its various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc provides an easy to use and powerful tool at our disposal that helps us promote business and share information quickly. Social Media with its varied platforms provides the below benefits:

• Increased Brand Recognition

• Improved Brand Loyalty

• More opportunities to convert customers

• Higher conversion rates However to achieve all these benefits, small business owners should ensure they follow these 6 important trends:

• Create social media accounts: Creating social media business accounts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn showcases your company's brand and culture. Apart from visibility, it allows audiences to connect with the brand irrespective of the platform they access which ensures trust and credibility amongst current and potential customers. Each platform has its own strength that benefits a business in their unique way. Twitter is a good conversational platform where as Instagram, Pinterest work best for pictorial and editorial promotion. Facebook is a great B2C platform, whereas LinkedIn may be better for B2B connections. Choosing a platform that suits the strength of ones business plays a crucial role.

• Create your own content: Content on social media includes images, blogs, videos, tweets, info graphics or blog posts. Quality of the posts is more important is as opposed to number of posts. A good content marketing strategy ensures increased engagement, improved ROI, higher traffic and more positive brand awareness.

• Share and promote: Ads or social media management tools plays an important role in promoting your business. Facebook helps you to “boost your posts” so that they appear higher on your audience’s News Feed, increasing the chances that they be seen. LinkedIn provides “sponsored updates” which allow you to share content from your company page with specific people outside your following. Google AdWords helps you advertise locally and attract customers with the products that they're searching for with pay-per-click ad on Google. Twitter Ads objective based campaigns are designed to help business owners achieve results that drive action and add value to business.

• Analyze results: It's vital to analyze and understand the performance of the shared content. It provides an understanding of the affinity audiences have towards the brand and their preferences. Understanding analytics of the social media assets gives brands an edge over its competitors. Google Analytics, HootSuite, Twitalyzer are some of the tools brand use for analytics.

• Repurpose popular content: If it's not broke don't fix it. When you know what works with your audience, don’t be afraid to reuse or repurpose popular content and strategies. If you know your audience shares and interacts more with certain types of posts, share more of them. It will help to keep the engagement level high. Analyze your content to find what works. It may take some time to find the perfect marketing method for your small business, but once you do, continue with it. Analytics will help you identify content that wasn’t successful, try something new. Experimenting with different types of posts like video, gifs, photos or article will keep the content fresh and lively.

• Build your own community: Building a community of loyal audiences is important for business! Social media makes it easy to build communities as it allows you to follow other people, pages and profiles, provides with option to repost content, and respond to comments. Creating social media accounts and social media manager as a method of customer support, helps in generating good will and drive more traffic. Using tools like Online Reputation Management (ORM) and Customer Relationship Management(CRM) to respond to people’s feedback and queries will help in maintaining a strong presence on your networks.

By engaging and interacting with your audience on a regular basis, your community will begin to expand before you know it and create a strong loyal base of audiences for your business.